The Craghold Legacy

by Michael Avallone

  She was close enough to that already.

  Her mind was a seething cauldron of doubt, terror, despair.

  And the fantastic business of being the last of the remaining Van Ruys, and perhaps the mistress of the very hotel in which she was a mere guest, was topmost on this totem of absurdity.

  The rocky path began to end; she was drawing close to the base of the mountain. Behind her the mighty caves towered. She did not look back. She would never look back, now.

  When her feet had at last touched the cold hard earth and she saw the high and thickened mass of foliage that was Goblin Wood off on her left, she drew a deep, happy breath. Suddenly she felt free, airy. A great weight had lifted from her chest and shoulders. And then, all unthinkingly, all understandably, she began to run. The delayed shock of all that had occurred now seemed to put wings on her heels. She streaked for the roadway, cutting across the wide expanse of dry barren ground until she had reached the perimeter of the woods. Her lungs were bursting, her heart pumping wildly, but it was better to run—for cover, to hide, to get away from whatever it was that had turned the day into a nightmare. Into Death.

  She tore through the thickets, trampled bushes. Saplings ripped at her parka jacket but she didn’t care. She wanted to get as far away from The Caves of Hex as possible.

  Somewhere along the hurtling route through the woods she had to stop running, to collect her breath and strength. It was then that she saw the long wooden crate lying on the grey-green earth, looking so odd and out-of-place in such a wilderness. The box was lying almost directly across her path, as she had chosen to cut over a hillock of earth to find an easier lane. Confused, wondering what this new spectacle might prove to be, she drew closer to the box. It was a harmless-looking thing, with an odd series of small holes showing at the head of the lid. The lid was fastened on one side with a cheap hasp closed from the outside.

  Not really knowing what was urging her, Anne Fenner drew nearer to the box, reached down and unsnapped the hasp. Her heart was still beating too rapidly, but somehow the mystery of this crate in the wilderness got the better of the instinct that urged her to return to Craghold House and safety, the sooner the better.

  With trembling but firm fingers she raised the lid of the crate. It creaked upwards easily, without too much effort on her part. A shaft of daylight quickly revealed the contents of the odd crate. Anne Fenner gasped in amazement.

  She saw a lovely waxen face, taffy-colored blonde hair, and the black garments of the dead—blacker than ink—robes that enveloped the figure in the box like a shroud. The red lips of the face were strangely placid, as were all of the features of the woman.

  For woman it was, with her arms folded across her bosom, crossed in an attitude of religious fealty—of some perhaps unknown obeisance.

  Anne Fenner put her hand to her mouth, holding back another scream that was building in her throat.

  The sleeping woman in the crate was someone she knew.

  It was Hilda, the bookkeeper of Craghold House, already prepared and unconsciously awaiting her sacrifice that very night to Preacher Podney’s god. A bride-to-be for Lucifer, when the Brotherhood returned after supper with their families to consummate their hellish ritual—their fiendish games.

  Anne Fenner may have cost the lives of three people, all unknowingly. But—

  —just as unknowingly—she had saved the life of another.

  The Lord indeed can move in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, just as the Bible claims.

  Not Preacher Podney’s Lord, however.

  The Prince of Darkness is not interested in mercy.

  Leaves A Legacy

  “I see my bags are all ready for me. As usual. Wentworth, of course?”

  “Of course, Miss Fenner.”

  “Carteret, I may be back. There is something I have to find out about myself in Boston. You may see me again, in spite of all the terrible things that seem to happen in a country like this one.”

  “We do hope you will return. And again, our thanks. Were it not for you, I shudder to think what might have happened to Hilda.”

  “Just luck, I guess. And I— don’t really want to talk any more about it, Carteret. It’s been like a nightmare.”

  “Oh, I understand.”

  “Do you really? I wonder.”

  Even in the electric lighting of the lobby, with all its Dutch trappings and furnishings, Anne Fenner could not quite eradicate the thought that she was leaving something undone. Incomplete. It was the lean, dark man behind the Registration Desk, with his heavily lidded eyes, sinister face and careful individual gestures—the way his long and aristocratic fingers played along the counter, the fixity of his smile. And damnable unseen Wentworth, that shoemaker’s elf of a porter, had come and gone again, all without a trace of his passage. Once more her bags were set down in the hall, ready for the appearance of the Craghold taxicab which would take her to the depot, writing a final finis to this ghastly time in her life. The piano was going to seem the heavenliest of instruments after the hellish ordeal she had experienced at Craghold House.

  The details had been taken care of, as inevitably they would have to be. Wilton Maxwell’s telegram, which provided a thread back to Guy Warmsby, would dispose of three unfortunate corpses. Anne Fenner’s eyewitness report to a Kragmoor judge had duly accounted for one accident, one homicide, and one death by person or persons unknown. Anne had not had to explain that one to the judge; it seemed that a long life in Kragmoor country enabled one to account for a lot of unexplained things. As for Preacher Podney and his hellish Brotherhood, no real harm had come to Hilda Warnsdorf, and then again, Kragmoor law was the sort of thing to make a big city girl shake her head. The Preacher and his clan were fined, warned, and let off scot-free to do their own particular thing again. It was all so confusing.

  Yet there still remained the most confusing thing of all: her possible claim to ownership of Craghold House. Was she a Van Ruys?

  She was going to have to make the same kind of search that Peter Cowles obviously had. There had been no kind of evidence, no papers or notes of any kind, in the rooms of the three victims of whatever it was that made Craghold House something to fear.

  She had seen the ghost of the Colonel.

  She had walked into a room bathed in silver and crystalized splendor.

  There was no accounting for either of those things.

  Carteret was still a puzzle.

  Wentworth a mystery.

  And she was going back home, with none of it explained to her own satisfaction. Somehow, she suspected she might never know the secret of Craghold House, just as she would probably go to her grave never knowing what awful thing it was that Katharine Cowles had seen at The Caves of Hex. Or how a tree had toppled.

  She shuddered involuntarily, wrapped her woolen plaid muffler about her throat, and restrained an icy shudder. Carteret’s bleak smile widened from his great height above the desk.

  “Your cab has come, Miss Fenner. And I shall say—au revoir—we shall meet again.”

  She had not heard the sound of the vehicle driving up outside. But he had, obviously. Sighing, Anne Fenner turned to pick up her two Tourister suitcases.

  They were not there.

  “Wentworth—” Carteret began.

  “Has already put them in the cab,” she moaned helplessly. “Oh, God, I know. Goodbye, Carteret.”

  He nodded and she headed for the lobby, marching straight out of the homey, strange, terrifying hotel.

  She tried not to run.

  Night had closed over Kragmoor country and the hotel itself was its old familiar Gothic silhouette—steepled, turreted and so very stark, looming against the horizon. Anne Fenner entered the waiting cab, and as she did so the full moon, in its final death throes, winked out just once from the depths of a bank of dark clouds illuminating the country landscape. It was so beautiful for all of its unholy mystery.

  Far off in the darkness, the Shanokin Range lay sleeping. To the north,
The Caves of Hex sat beneath a moonlit sky. And Goblin Wood filled the flat tablelands of Kragmoor country.

  Anne Fenner did not look back again.

  As the cab rattled forward, down the twisting stone lane out to the roadway, her eyes were on the future.

  Tomorrow.

  Boston.

  And the prospects of being an heiress.

  She didn’t want to think about Craghold or the three dead people who might have been hexed from the very beginning of it all.

  Hex.

  She shuddered again.

  What an awful word that was.

  So inhuman.

  Inside the hotel, at the Registration Desk, Carteret’s lean and haunting smile had disappeared.

  His eyes seemed brooding and thoughtful as he heard the taxicab clatter away. In the lights of the lobby, he looked more foreign and legendary than ever.

  For a hotel manager.

  Anne Fenner, on her way to the train depot, was lost in her own private world of anticipation. By the light of the late October moon it seemed that, all in all, considering everything in its proper perspective, she was a very lucky young lady. Blessed with beauty, intelligence, youth—and a very possible fortune. The future looked so promising—

  But Craghold House, no matter what happened, would never be very far from her thoughts.

  Or nightmares.

  Late that very night, with the unflickering light of the yellow candle at his left, Carteret was reading again in his darkened sanctum sanctorum. His lean body was motionless, his head poised, his eyes rigidly fixed on the printed pages of the book he held propped up on the clapboard table. From the passageway beyond his door, he heard the faint, skipping footfalls once again. And as always, the low and blithe knocking sounds came at his chamber door.

  “Yes?” Carteret intoned.

  “The hour is at hand and all is well.”

  “Good. I am ready.”

  There was a perhaps meaningful pause.

  “Comes a ghost. Along the Lake. For an innocent soul to take—”

  “Yes. I know.”

  A chuckle sounded in the corridor, hollow and somehow unreal.

  “Would we, should we, could we—join the shade?”

  “Go to bed, my friend. I’ll handle the matter, as you know.”

  “Very well. Good night, my friend.”

  “Good night,” Carteret agreed.

  Within seconds after the benevolent murmurs of the voice in the hall had stilled, followed by a rustling, departing sound of movement, Carteret snuffed out the candle.

  The room plunged into darkness.

  There was, however, no sound of the lid closing on the box in the corner. Soon the door to the chamber opened, and a yellowed sliver of light reached briefly into the darkness. The door closed once more. Someone, something, had left the chamber.

  But it would not have been visible to the naked eye.

  To the common man. Or woman.

  Or to a scientist schooled in material things and all matter having weight, size, substance. And Reality.

  Silence reigned over the dark interior of Craghold House. Beyond the jagged outlines of the hotel itself, a night wind stole softly over the ground, fanning the cypress trees that bounded the grounds. The oaks and elms shuddered too.

  Then the Grandfather’s Clock in the hallway alcove tolled.

  The lonely and desolate hour of three.

  Three o’clock.

  In Kragmoor country.

  Preacher Podney stirred restlessly in his big brassbound bed. The windows of his bedroom commanded a fine view of the land toward Craghold Lake. He was having a difficult time sleeping. He was a lonely man who had never married, and the failure of his Brotherhood to initiate Hilda Warnsdorf into the beauty and truth of a Death for Lucifer had fully galled him all week. Interfering strangers from the big cities! That foolish judge! The simple minds who tried to foil him—

  The tall, gaunt man moaned in his half-sleep and opened his eyes. He was facing the bedroom window, and suddenly he sat upright in his bed, oddly uneasy. The room was black as night, and he clearly recalled having drawn the shades upon retiring. But now—he rubbed at his moist, gleaming eyes and stared at the window.

  The shade was rolled all the way up.

  The window itself was open.

  He could feel the night air in the room, entering every pore of his flesh. He pawed at his nightshirt and scratched himself. He blinked a few times, rallying from sleep completely, and grumbled in a low undertone. His black beard bristled with annoyance. Cursing, he climbed out of the bed and walked stiffly to the window.

  It must be late—he had gone to bed after midnight. He could see the thick blackness of the evening. Or early morning.

  Yet, even as he reached the window the moon seemed to come out, emerging from behind the clouds.

  Preacher Podney’s bedroom flooded with moon-wash, with silver and a halation of weird light—an almost blazing radiation.

  He blinked his eyes again.

  When he opened them, his heart stood still.

  His brain locked and stopped functioning.

  He recoiled slowly, unable to lift his feet and run.

  For a man who believed in the Devil and Darkness and all things ungodly, his reaction was one or paradoxical reversal. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, and his great hypnotic eyes batted furiously.

  Before him, directly outside the window, an enormous black shadow—an ugly, loathesome black thing—was hovering, flapping dark, curved, jagged wings. And two piercing red-flamed eyes stared deep into the heart and soul of Preacher Podney.

  A bat.

  A creature of the night.

  Obscene, unclean—Evil itself.

  Preacher Podney suddenly fell to his knees, hands clasped in prayerful desperation, his mouth trying to form words, his gaunt body trembling to its very foundations.

  He tried to cry out in terror, to pray.

  To call for help.

  He couldn’t.

  Suddenly the bat made a weirdly low, keening cry of its own, a bleat of sound. Then it came hurtling through the open window, soaring, heeling over, coming down with deadly accuracy on Preacher Podney’s throat.

  The room echoed and re-echoed with the awful screams of Preacher Podney, Devil-worshipper.

  The Preacher had tragically forgotten the greatest precept of all for anyone who has ever embraced the canons and laws of the Prince of Darkness.

  Satan never sleeps.

  Beyond the window, along the Lake itself, a tall shadow moved—gliding, drifting, arms extended toward the majestic boundaries of Kragmoor country.

  If you enjoyed The Craghold Legacy, please share your thoughts by leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

  For more discounted reads and a free eBook when you join, sign up to our newsletter.

  And why not follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for more great book news.